Last week my Computer Science and Game Programming classes had the honor of having a Skype conversation with Bob Pappas. In the early 1980s, Bob wrote the games Frogger, Bounceoids and Crazy Painter for the TRS-80. During our conversation Bob showed my classes the original advertising for these games. Born near the Iron Range of Minnesota, Bob did not have distractions like teens of today. He had only three TV stations and most of them were fuzzy. Bob spent his days reading Byte Magazine so he could discover new programming languages. It was from a contest in this magazine that he decided to write his first game. He won the contest and his passion for computers, programming and games had begun!The students were captivated by the struggles he encountered in the very early days of the industry. Since BASIC (one of the first and easiest languages) was not fast enough, he used assembly language (which is similar to machine language). He saved his materials to tape. (He had to explain to the students what a cassette tape was.) He only had 16K of memory, 128 pixel screen and two colors – black and white. In order to add sound to the game, he had to slow the program down and write a second program for sound. He also had to be his own salesperson and place calls to try and sell his games.
Bob started college at the University of Minnesota. While working on an internship at Honeywell on a 3D graphics flight simulator, Bob dropped out to pursue his computer interests. In 1985 Bob saw his first Mac, fell in love and purchased this new machine. He spent the next nine months, 12 hours a day, learning the software language so he could write programs for this new machine. He then wrote Mac Golf a five-year top selling Apple game.
The students then asked Bob about a new product he worked on for the iPad – CodeA. This new programming language, written in Lua, allows students to easily create, share, or sell interactive games for the iPad. This software is definitely on my list of ideas for new curriculum for my next programming class.
We learned that Bob worked for Microsoft for 3.5 years on Silverlight – a product similar to Flash. Since most of my students are PC (rather than Apple) oriented, they couldn’t understand why he would leave Microsoft to go work for – of all companies – Apple! He explained that he left Microsoft because the iPhone and other related products had come out and he realized that Microsoft was not going to keep up with Apple. Bob is currently the engineering manager for Apple iPhoto in California.
Finally, I love the fact that Bob talked extensively about 21st century skills. He explained how to break down problems into smaller manageable pieces. He talked about teamwork and collaborating with others. He explained that they should use the many free resources (http://www.codecademy.com/ and http://www.udacity.com/) available to them to continue their programming and problem solving experiences. However, what I loved the most about his conversation with my students was that he took his valuable time to share his life experiences with us! Thanks so much Bob! (Below is a 21st century thank you from my students to Bob)
